In one sense, that's what happened; guns needn't be fired to do their work. But the real story is more complicated and nuanced.

The invasion incited neighbor fears and stirred up suspicions about a house down Monument Road that has served for years as a boarding facility for people dealing with disability, addiction and homelessness. The house was built 50 years ago in what was semi-rural scrubland. Today, the property marks the transition to the prosperous subdivisions between Grand Junction and the public land playgrounds to the south.

At some point, the residence was substantially remodeled into a sprawling el-Rancho-Spanish-eclectic-style stucco with a shaded porch. Its surround of trailers, outbuildings and corrals wouldn't merit a second glance on a country road twenty miles from here.

With enough upkeep, the house would still fit in with the developing area called the Redlands. But its poor residents probably never will.

The owner, a woman with a generous heart, had taken in boarders who needed in-home care. With time, their needs became more than she could serve, so she rented to others who could pay well below market rent.

When the break-in occurred, eyes turned down the road, ready to assign blame to "the homeless" who might be skulking up the trails that run alongside our subdivision. The property was not quite what police would class as a "nuisance house," but miscellaneous complaints and calls had put it on a county watch list.

Since I know two brothers who were staying at the house, I asked if indeed the man had come from there.

He had.

***

In Colorado, a citizen has no duty to retreat before resorting to the use of deadly force when faced with imminent peril in his or her home. Our neighbors, wrenched awake by the commotion and finding this crazed stranger in their house, would have been acting within the law if they had blown him away and obliterated any narrative other than self-defense.

The man, bloodied from his plunge through the broken glass, was apparently under the influence of drugs. He babbled about the Mexican Mafia chasing him. He was missing a shoe and his bare foot and legs where riddled with cactus spines from his run through the desert.

For the moment, our neighbors had no way of knowing whether he was paranoid or whether his pursuers would soon come charging down their driveway. Yet, despite their own fear, they recognized a terrified human being seeking sanctuary and calmed him as they waited for the cops.

***

Last night, we held a neighborhood meeting to air out concerns about crime and to inform folks about what had just happened.

According to the deputies who are working to address issues with the house down the road, the recent event was atypical of such break-ins, which usually involve criminals preying on criminals or people involved in disputes with each other. While we can't rule out all risk, the officers conveyed that they didn't regard the property as being a likely source of danger for its neighbors. We are barely on the law enforcement radar.

While still dealing with the disquieting after-effects of the invasion, the homeowners have responded with compassion. They hope the perpetrator can get help for his addiction and escape the paranoia that recently made him flee California to join his stepfather in the house down the road.

No torches were lit last night, and perhaps a few were extinguished.

Neighbors, at least those who attended the meeting, now have a better sense that our area is safe and what they can do to keep it that way. They have a stronger commitment to watch out for each other. One even asked if the woman who owns the house can get some help in more effectively screening and managing her rentals.

Still, under the same circumstances, other households might've exercised their rights differently.

How quickly prejudice and suspicion can balloon into fear, and fear into a perceived threat. How easy it is under stress to act without fully understanding the situation. In a national political climate that fosters fear of the Other, how reasonable it is to believe your castle is ever in need of defending.

This is Colorado. We are not all bleeding hearts here on the Redlands. Some of us have guns in our houses and a determination to assert our right of self-defense, even if it means killing a stranger.

Fortunately, drawn by the bright security lights, that desperate man picked a house where he was greeted by a shotgun and two kind and deliberate hearts.

Small businesses and nonprofits have a lot in common: They operate on thin margins, develop strong local ties and support their communities’ economic and social wellbeing.

But what happens to those strong bonds when an online retailing giant comes in with a deal that benefits one side and threatens the other? That was the question at the heart of a recent mini-rebellion led by a feisty western Colorado bookseller, who heard her favorite community radio station, KAFM, promoting a new fundraising partnership with Amazon.

Margie Wilson, owner of Grand Valley Books and another bookstore in Grand Junction, asked, “How does a community-supported organization expect to keep receiving local business support when they encourage their members to shop for books and other products on Amazon?”

At issue was the benign-sounding AmazonSmile program. AmazonSmile lets charities use Amazon’s technology to raise funds from supporters via click-and-forget transactions. After a one-time signup, it automatically uses 0.5 percent of a qualified sale to benefit a nonprofit designated by the purchaser.

These are sales, says Amazon, that were going to the company anyway. The consumer feels good about supporting a chosen charity, and the organization raises more money without added fundraising overhead. For cash-strapped nonprofits with limited technical resources, this looks like a risk-free helping hand.

To Wilson and other main street business owners, it felt more like a slap in the face. A powerful competitor that participates little in the hometown’s charitable or civic affairs was harvesting local goodwill, customer browser information and purchases that sent dollars out of the community.

Wilson decided to take a stand. She enlisted customers, friends of the station and other business owners to ask the KAFM Board to reconsider its participation.

The board did — and then voted to terminate its AmazonSmile partnership, saying: “The fundraising method that sparked the controversy arose out of new technology, but the KAFM Board determined the resolution needed to come from an old ‘technology’ — neighbors helping neighbors.”

The reversal with Amazon shouldn’t make a dent in the station’s revenue. (The average consumer spends just under $1,000 annually with Amazon. That’s $5 per donor who signs on to the program.)

Indeed, I talked to another local nonprofit exec who says its AmazonSmile relationship is not considered a source of charitable dollars. Rather, it’s used more like a cash-back credit card for comparison shopping and making large purchases of items that are hard to find locally. Her search for a solid gallium supplier, for example, led her to a small Ohio company. She estimates this approach has saved thousands of taxpayer dollars on the science kits it produces for public schools.

Not all products sold on Amazon compete with local retailers, and some of the “Amazon” sellers are actually small businesses searching for customers beyond their communities.

So why should local nonprofits be concerned about healthy relations with businesses that do compete with Amazon? Online sales transactions support Amazon’s business model but not the more participatory relationships most nonprofits want to cultivate. In other words, “I gave at Amazon” could become the new line, “I gave at the office.”

Rob Bleiberg, executive director of the Mesa Land Trust, empathizes with fellow nonprofits seeking creative ways to expand fundraising, but also appreciates how good ideas don’t always produce the desired results.

His group once enlisted two businesses to collect a voluntary 1 percent surcharge from their customers to support land preservation. While the experiment was well received, the land trust lacked the resources to scale up the program beyond the original cafe and bike shop. When ownerships changed, it was discontinued.

Bleiberg said small businesses give his organization “wonderful support,” and he counted off the ways: Cash donations, owners serving on the board, memberships, event underwriting, publicity, ties to national suppliers, and providing matching funds to attract donations.

Last year, he said, 65 businesses wrote checks for over $30,000, covering about 7 percent of his organization’s operating budget. And some owners gave as individuals, too. In addition, three local establishments sponsored events and drink promotions earlier this year that raised several thousand dollars for a bike trail project. All these events help build community among like-minded people, and they produced sales that stay in town to recirculate in the local economy.

Local business owners “use the bike trails and see expansion as a good amenity for the town, they’re good citizens, and their support is good advertising to a compelling demographic,” Bleiberg said.

On one of those points, at least, small businesses and Amazon agree.

[This post first appeared as a column distributed by Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org). It's also cross-posted at my author site, charliequimby.com.]

It's been quiet here as my volunteering has been interrupted by a busy travel schedule. This entry is cross-posted from my author blog as "The old news and a few remarks on events intervening."

Last night, we heard artist Andy Sturdevant describe his residency for Coffee House Press's In the Stacks program. He'd taken items from old issues of a community newsletter and updated what had happened in the intervening years. This morning my wife found a letter folded in sixths marking a spot in a volume of Orwell's essays.

Its discovery, common vintage and similar typeface to that newsletter may have simply been a coincidence...

Each Sunday night for seven years, almost without fail, my father cranked seven pieces of onionskin and six carbons through a manual typewriter and then with brute force wrote his way to the bottom of the page.*

He never revised and rarely made typos or other errors. I can't remember a letter from him that left more whitespace than was needed for the date and standard salutation, Dear Everyone, and the signoff, Love, with Mom + Dad written by hand.

The letters started when his one and only baby daughter left home. They ended when he fell into the severe depression that led him to end his life.

The reports were detailed yet succinct, one paragraph per subject, though the thread might range widely.

In his letter dated July 27, 1980, he manages to cover my sister finding a job and playing in the state softball tournament; one brother planning to come home and then being unable to get time off; another brother and his wife visiting, then driving with my parents partway across the state before splitting off to their home. As he wrote that evening, the same brother called with the news that my mother and father were about to become grandparents for the first time.

A lot of life packed into that narrative of one week—and that was only the second paragraph.

Certain themes recurred—local politics, charities and public service boards, and travel, usually together and mostly for work (him) and public meetings (my mother was the town's first woman mayor). Story threads came and went—a home-built gazebo project it seemed would never be completed, racketball (sic) adventures, and a Subaru he'd won in a lottery that behaved like a gift horse with bad teeth.

Here he is reporting on the annual bank picnic:

Had it in Lincoln Park and had to have the police clear the pushers out of the park for the picnic, then in the later evening they picked up some of the jobs corps boys who thought they were making off with a keg of our beer, but it was actually an empty keg. Guess we'll have to find a better place or give up our annual picnic. The group has gotten too large for the usual back yard picnic.

Yes, the floating G is a sign of man who types fast and hard, barely waiting for the shift. You could tell if you'd received the top copy. Some of the periods might be drilled right through the sheet.

His letter-writing wasn't Art, but it was an art. His own family had scattered with good reason, and the pieces would join only briefly and uneasily.

Unlike today's Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/email, which might as well be for Dear Everyone, his letters reached his children through the Postal Service. There were six of us around the country. Had a daughter not finally arrived, the Quimby family might have grown beyond the reproductive capacity of that day's carbon paper technology.

My father was a bank president by then. He could have dictated the letter. He could have dashed it off longhand and had his assistant type it. Either way, he could have had it photocopied, sparing the recipient of the stack's bottom copy from too much squinting and head scratching.

But that would use the bank's dime and set a poor example.

He addressed the fading image problem in his own frugal way, rotating which copy each child received. Somehow, he kept track.

I no longer remember the sequence or the order from week to week. Perhaps we all got to experience the sensation of slowly going blind, followed by a miraculous recovery. But it might have been that our vision seemed to gradually improve, until we were plunged back into a faint and disappearing realm.

Neither of those subtexts seems quite right, but I am sure of one thing.

He took care to the very end to keep it straight.

_______

* If you find the ancient technology references here puzzling, I hope you can find a parent and ask them.

I'm back in Grand Junction until May, and with a throttled-back book schedule, I'm posting here again.

The first day back at the Day Center after a long absence always requires some adjustment. New rules get posted. The volunteer crew has changed. I have to reacquaint myself with where certain supplies are stored.

But most of all, I brace myself for the news.

It could be good, of course. Someone went back to work. A couple who'd been camping found a place to live. A court-assigned rehab is going well.

But it could also be bad. Someone's in prison. A couple's split and lost what tenuous support they gave each other. The lessons learned in rehab weren't applied on the street.

No one I know has died since I left last spring. At least from what I've heard. It's only my first day back.

It's kind of a mixed deal seeing people again. That they're here means they're alive and holding it together well enough to use our services. But it also means they haven't gotten out of their homeless state.

A woman I hadn't seen for a couple years was back today, as was a man who'd supposedly left to live with a relative in Wyoming last year.

These people who get called transients are often simply trying to better their situation. What looks like random chaos or vagrancy from the outside is sometimes a stab at improvement or survival made by a person with few resources.

The grass looks greener. An old family rift seems like it's repaired. Somebody knows somebody who might have work. Or it's just gotten too uncomfortable where they are.

There's a couple here I love whose troubles and craziness and addictions have finally blown them apart. The shortness of the fuse was apparent last spring but because I believe in their deeper goodness, I had hopes.

He shared with me what's happened since I went to his sentencing hearing. It was the usual mix of insight and acceptance of blame jumbled up with tales of financial irresponsibility, crazy infatuation and an attempt to puzzle out whether a certain winning Powerball number could possibly have been random.

I tried to follow his Kaballah-like calculations, which were mathematically correct but unmoored from reason.

Finally, he looked at me and said, "It's hard for me to occupy my mind every day."

Time is a very different burden for people with no job, no prospects and no home.

I talked to his wife later. I asked how she was doing and she told me a story about how last December she'd reached the end of her rope at 4 AM, standing wrapped in a sleeping bag outside the Mission, which is about as low as you can go to find shelter against the remarkable cold that had hit the valley. It's where the sex offenders and men released from prison submit themselves to Jesus because it's the only place that will take them in.

Her cell phone rang at 5 AM.

"It was my sister, who never calls me. She was calling to tell me she'd just won $5,000 in the lottery, and she was going to rent me a room."

I know the place. It's a house a few miles from us on Monument Road.

"I'm covered through February and then I'm going to take over payments."

I don't know what will happen down the road. The house is about three miles from town and there's no transit. She's fallen back before.

But I can see why her husband might be wondering if the lottery numbers are truly random.

Last week I got the great news Monument Road has been selected by independent booksellers as one of ten adult fiction titles for the
American Booksellers Association's fall "Celebrate Debut Authors With
Indies" promotion.

That means traveling to New York City for the BookExpo America and hobnobbing, however briefly, with booksellers and librarians from around the country.

Having a novel about to launch will forge a new relationship with booksellers, and it's gotten me thinking more deeply about my personal history with the book business—as a customer, store employee, book scout, book marketer, reviewer—and builder of non-compliant stairway bookcases.

Admittedly, my experiences span a lot of years, but it's sobering that so many of these important places exist now only in memory.

As I visit stores in conjunction with the book promotion, I'll write about them. But meantime, I'll do a series of posts about the places that left me booksmitten, starting with the first important shop in my life.

-----

I grew up in a small resort town in Colorado that had no bookstore I can recall, but the public library had a great selection of books for young people and I was allowed to use some of my paper route money to subscribe to comic books.

My parents belonged to Book of the Month Club and ordered all the titles from the We Were
There series of (mostly American) historical novels written for children,
with titles like We Were There on the Oregon Trail and We Were There with the
Pony Express. Those books made me feel like pre-teens could be part of great events and not
just play sports and solve improbable mysteries. (I think my nifty child's book plates came as a perk for subcribing.)

When I was 15 my family moved to Grand Junction, where I finally experienced a real bookstore. I bought Alan Ginsberg's Howl at Readmore Books, an independent bookseller on Main Street, and sampled exotic writers like ee cummings and Ezra Pound at the library. But the library also sheltered me from the scandalous local author Dalton Trumbo and who knows what else?

The changes occuring in America during the mid-60s rarely made it in the local news and they surely didn't fit with the community mores in a smallish western city. As kid who tilted well left in a conservative area, I had very few peers and no approved venues for expression.

Readmore became my lifeline to the rest of the world. It was vital to my intellectual and political development not just as a bookstore but as a source of periodicals—especially those dedicated to new and controversial voices.

Alongside more mainstream journals like The New Yorker and The New Republic, I could find magazines like Ramparts, Avant Garde and Fact—publications that did not appear on the library shelves or at the drugstore.

Readmore is gone now, but its spirit is carried on by two indies on Main Street, and its importance to a developing young writer abides in my bones.

The man I'll call Martin walks around the corner and back before coming in the front door of the Day Center. That's a common approach by first-time visitors since the building has no sign to identify us—just a partially glassed-in vestibule that might once have been the entry to a defunct dry cleaners.

Right now, though, it's a pretty good bet this is the place he's been sent to learn about services for the homeless, since through the window he can see a man with two black eyes who's too intoxicated to be admitted.

Martin's a small man in his 70s with a round, pleasant, hypertensive face and white hair. Imagine actor Ray Walston, long past his My Favorite Martian days, playing a leprechaun.

Only this leprechaun is towing an oxygen bottle with one hand and grips the handle of three-footed cane with the other.

Martin has toddled over from the Rescue Mission, a few blocks away. The Rescue Mission specializes in recently released prisoners who are trying to get reintegrated into straight society and need a stable address to give their parole officer. He told me upon release he was dropped on a street corner in Denver with a box of his possessions that he couldn't transport, given his walker and oxygen bottle. He went into a store to call a cab, and by the time he came back out, his box was gone.

He doesn't say how he got to Grand Junction, and I don't ask. With new guests, my job is to be welcoming, orient them to our services as well as what they want to know about other help, and collect some basic information.

Are you homeless? How long? Where are you living? Are you a veteran? Disabilities? Employed or looking for work?

We also ask if they have identification and for contact information for another person we could reach in case of an emergency. Many do not have driver licenses. They have a state ID card, a corrections ID or need to replace a lost ID. A fair number list a local relative, and a similar number, including Martin, can't supply the name of anyone at all.

In Martin's case, he had a Colorado Corrections ID and another card that identified him as a registered sex offender.

In my forthcoming novel, Monument Road, a young man working in his sister's day care center is accused of inappropriate touching. Joe Samson, a local reporter, decides to use the case as a hook for a deeper investigation. He interviews the police official responsible for tracking the county's sex offenders:

The captain unrolled his bundle, a county map covered
with colored plastic tapes, the sort used to mark legal documents for
signature. “Every one of these tabs represents a registered sex offender,” he
said. “About half of these are in Grand Junction, the rest in the county’s
jurisdiction. The vision is to be able to generate a map from the database and see
all our sex offenders in one place.” He paused. “So to speak.”

The map covered McLearn’s desk. In places, the tabs
were stuck atop each other, as if a load of autumn leaves had been dumped on a
neighborhood. Joe’s eyes scanned immediately to the Redlands. No flags close to
his house. He looked for the Crimmins-Diaz address. There was a scatter of red
and yellow tabs on Orchard Mesa, but none very near Wee Amigos Day Care.

McLearn said, “County-wide, we’re watching more than
four hundred. The number’ll just keep growing, because once these guys
register, it’s tough to get off the list. If they stay clean, they can petition
for removal, but who wants to be the judge who decided a guy was not a
threat—then he goes out and abducts a little girl?”

“So the numbers
keep growing, the problem looks worse, the public cries out for more protection
and the numbers grow some more.” Joe meant to phrase it as a question.

“You could put it that way,” said McLearn. “I didn’t.
There are definitely predators you want to supervise forever. But that’s only
about four of the four hundred guys we’re tracking. The rest—especially your
child molesters—their risk of re-offending is way lower than your average
criminal.”

“And why is that?” Joe asks. “Do the extra restraints
work?”

McLearn shuffled through a drawer, then gave up
looking. “A while back, there was a big hue and cry over child molesters living
near schools and playgrounds. The state did a study before passing a new law
restricting where they could live. It found their distance from schools and
such didn’t make any difference. You know what mattered most?”

“I’m guessing it wasn’t some extra-special public
humiliation,” Joe said. McLearn gave him a sharp look. “I mean, it seems like a
funny system, where a paroled drug dealer or murderer could move in next door
and you wouldn’t know it, but you get notified about a guy who got a
sixteen-year-old pregnant. So what does matter most?”

“Support systems,” said McLearn. “The guys are more
likely to succeed if they have treatment, a job, friends and neighbors who
support them. The trouble with shaming these guys—they’re more likely to move
away from their support network to get out of range of the pitchforks. We have
people come here from out of state exactly for that reason. I don’t want to say
community notification’s a joke, but most of the people we have here are
unlikely to reoffend. For the most part, you’re already going to know the
person who molests your child, and it’s someone you trust.”

Before turning
south across the bridge to the Redlands, the parkway snakes between the
river and a wasteland of rubble bill-boarded with promises of professional spa
installation, exceptional dental care and relief from DUI charges. Leonard sees
a ladder-racked pickup coming up on his right, racing to pass before the road
narrows to two lanes. The truck bed is overloaded with yard waste, paint
buckets and miscellaneous unbagged trash that flits in the slipstream coming
off the back. Leonard’s in no hurry, but the reckless move irritates him and he
holds his place against being overtaken. The driver takes some shoulder before
squeezing in at the curve, spinning a salvo of gravel across Leonard’s grille.
Through their back window he can see two yahoos bobbing their heads toward each
other in celebration of the maneuver. Let
it go, he tells himself, just as the driver swerves again only to jolt over
an unseen obstacle, sending up a shower of debris. Leonard feels the thump,
too, just as flapping newspapers burst in a flock from the truck bed, twist and plaster themselves across his windshield.

He ducks down to an opening where he can see to cross
the bridge and pull safely aside. By the time he steps out to a clear view of
the road, the offenders have disappeared over the rise. He strips off the
newspaper and mashes it into a ball. How long has it been since he even glanced
at the news? Another habit that slid away with Inetta. Behind him, on the
bridge, a stray tire bedevils the traffic. He considers walking back to clear
it, but the spot is blind and there’s no pedestrian walk on that side of the
bridge. Let someone with a cell phone call it in. He’s spent a year shrinking
his attention down to a pinhole, and with it, his sense of obligation to clean
up after the careless.

Time was, he took on such chores without thinking,
hauling strangers out of ditches, offering gas to stranded tourists, snugging
up a neighbor’s sagging fence. That was how it was out here. You made your
contribution to mutual survival—no recognition or recompense expected. Cowboy
karma, he’d heard somebody call it. Inetta might call it grace. But for all that, what did such steadfastness do for his mother and his
sister kneeling in the yard. Abner, alone and facedown in his field. Vaughn
bent sideways for good. Junior banished and then tumbling through space. Inetta
herself, slow walking away from him. No matter what Leonard Self decides about
his importance in the universe, if he turns his back on this, the tire will
still be off the bridge tomorrow and no one will even remember it was there. He
wishes he could talk it out with Inetta, hear again why it matters not to let
things slide. He used to step up without thinking on it because simple goodness needed a place to
lodge, entrusted closer to the real world than with an all-loving and do-nothing God.

He thinks of his own father, for the first time in a
long while without feeling a strangle in his throat. Had Leonard’s sense of
rightness only been the offspring of his father’s crime, or had he inherited
good examples, erased from memory by the final, bloody picture of the man? Leonard
had always supposed in his father an anger that became a poison and the poison
caused pain and its steady drip called for an end. But how big must a pain be
to also consume a wife and a daughter and a son? His old man was a young man
then, half Leonard’s age. He should’ve remembered how things change, how the
cold lifts and the desert greens and the humming birds come back. Leonard still
couldn’t see all the why of his father but he recognized a partial answer in
himself. The darkening was not pain but bone-deep numbness. Not nightmares but
short dreamless sleep and long wakefulness. Not chaos but an empty, unbudging sameness
that Inetta had been able to wave away whenever it gathered, but left alone
with it now, he was ready to roll to a stop.

Memory is unreliable and historical records provide an incomplete picture, so it's possible the valley I grew up in was not all that warmer than the one I walked through today. I know I didn't own a proper winter coat then, but I was also tougher, perhaps, and went more places in a car.

Still, there's no question the air quality in this high desert town is worse and the inversion phenomenon that traps bitter cold for weeks at a time seems to have worsened, too.

And we know why.

The particular shape of the valley combines with snow cover and weather systems to trap frigid air. Pollutants don't rise, forming a cloud that blocks sun from melting the snow and warming the earth.

Since Jan. 18, air quality in low-lying areas of Grand Junction has been
worse than Denver’s, a metropolitan center of 2.6 million people. For
that matter, the amount of fine particulates — a mix of acids like
nitrates and sulfates, organic chemicals, metals, soil and dust
particles — trapped above the valley are more concentrated here than in
any other city in Colorado.

...

[T]he pollution measuring less than 2.5 micrometers —
which creates the health risks — is caused by any number of combustion
sources. Smoke from wood-burning stoves and vehicle exhaust make up most
of it. Other factors include the use of hot water heaters, industrial
pollution, the effects of drilling and dust from dirt roads.

To climate change deniers, the cold provides an occasion to make gleeful comments about global warming. Others, whose denial has begun to be penetrated by science, have shifted to "yeah, but climate always changes. It's not my fault!"

And since climate changes, we have the earth's permission to go on doing what we've been doing. We press on with "reducing our dependence on foreign oil" without really addressing the dependence part. Another way to say it is, we're committed to using up our domestic energy supplies sooner rather than later.

No one can live in this valley and deny the massive changes that have taken place on earth or fail to see the relatively little say any puny creatures have had in the matter. But neither can they bundle up in an extra layer, watch their heating bill climb, and breathe lousy air, while believing mankind's fate is out of their hands.

This review is also posted at Goodreads. After I wrote it, I thought of James Howard Kunstler's A World Made by Hand, which has a more nuanced and less binary portrayal of the varieties of human experience after society breaks down.

*****

I don't usually review books that have been reviewed to death. Better to
find a worthy, unseen work and lift it up. But I'm making an exception
for Peter Heller's The Dog Stars because I haven't seen a review yet that tapped into the thread it opened up for me.

Like
Heller's main character Hig, flying over a flu-wasted Colorado looking
for someone to connect with, I tried to find a review that spoke to this
passage:

Still we are divided, there are cracks in the
union. Over principle. His: Guilty until—until nothing. Shoot first ask
later. Guilty, then dead. Versus what? Mine: Let a visitor live a minute
longer until they prove themselves to be human? Because they always do.
What Bangley said in the beginning: Never ever negotiate. You are
negotiating with your own death.

The reviews I've read are
enamored with the Mad Max/The Road comparisons with the novel's hopeful
endcap to the apocalypse. Or distracted by syntax. Fragments. No
punctuation. Sex wands exploding. (Well, Hig hadn't had sex for nine
years, so perhaps its rediscovery might be like a Harlequin Romance, but
I digress.)

Don't get me wrong. The Dog Stars is a read-it-in-one-or-two-sittings novel, but unlike Cormac McCarthy's The Road,
this one never brought me to tears. Instead, it made me wonder: Why are
so many readers responding to its "hopefulness" or its poetic treatment
of a world in both decline and regeneration instead of to the
assumption that, even for the sensitive and "weak" HIg, there were so
many Others who could simply be blown away because... well, because they
weren't Hig.

At another point, Hig says: "The ones who are left are mostly Not Nice."

Desperate
souls whose survival was foiled by HIg and his pal Bangley might be
forgiven for thinking the same of the sensitive aviator-poet. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, he ain't.

Most of the other humans portrayed in the
story are ciphers or caricatures worthy of one of those shooting arcade
games the NRA fears is eroding our values. They threaten, they die. A
little or a lot. But prove themselves human? Not a chance.

This
is a serious book by a serious writer, and Heller has clearly posed this
divide between two world views that are severely tested by the
apocalypse. But there isn't much follow through, and there's even less
by the admirers of the book.

I'm wondering if Heller is trying to
make a commentary on how we are living today—not about the future or
some idealized humanity.

Hig's partner Bangley and another
character he meets after he takes his fool's flight west are both
ex-special forces, hardened men who do not make the fine distinctions
that will get Hig killed. In fact, they are portrayed as the soldiers
and Navy Seals protecting us today, projected into a dystopian future.

Although
America has not been wiped out by a virus, we are protected by similar
men and similar values today. We have the luxury of our poetry and
hammock sex and contemplative fly fishing because the Bangleys of the
world have our backs.

In the real world, that is certainly the
view of the Bangleys. The Higs of us who "believe in the possibility of
connectedness" would not survive without the ruthlessness and killing
skills of hard men.

Because Hig finds love and there is new
greenery sprouting in the killed forests, we are encouraged to believe
there is hope. That the apocalypse isn't so bad. That the end isn't the
end.

Arabs, of all people, appear to be patrolling American
skies. Is that an ironic footnote or a reminder that we have so much
capacity to be wrong about Others?

It's not Heller's job to spell it out for us. And thank goodness, in his restraint, he didn't. But what about us readers?